by Jodi Picoult
She thinks, and then a slow smile lights her up from the inside out. "Wait for something that makes me come back."
This makes Taylor laugh out loud. "Maybe sometime we can wait together," he says, and he passes her a wrapper from a gauze pad. "Can I have your phone number?"
Kate scribbles it down as Taylor's IV begins to beep. The nurse comes in and unhooks his line. "You're outta here, Taylor," she says. "Where's your ride?"
"Waiting downstairs. I'm all set." He gets out of the padded chair slowly, almost weakly, the first reminder that this is not some casual conversation. He slips the piece of paper with our phone number into his pocket. "Well, I'll call you, Kate."
When he leaves Kate lets all her breath out in a dramatic finish. She rolls her head after him. "Oh my God," she gasps. "He is gorgeous."
The nurse, checking her flow, grins. "Tell me about it, honey. If only I were thirty years younger."
Kate turns to me, blooming. "You think he'll call?"
"Maybe," I say.
"Where do you think we'll go out?"
I think of Brian, who has always said that Kate can date . . . when she's forty. "Let's take one step at a time," I suggest. But inside, I am singing.
*
The arsenic, which ultimately put Kate into remission, worked its magic by wearing her down. Taylor Ambrose, a drug of an entirely different sort, works his magic by building her up. It becomes a habit: when the phone rings at seven P.M., Kate flies from the dinner table and hides in a closet with the portable receiver. The rest of us clear the dinner plates and spend time in the living room and get ready for bed, hearing little more than giggles and whispers, and then Kate emerges from her cocoon, flushed and glowing, first love beating like a hummingbird at the pulse in her throat. Every time it happens, I can't stop staring. It is not that Kate is so beautiful, although she is; it's that I never really let myself believe that I would see her all grown up.
I follow her into the bathroom one night, after one of her marathon phone sessions. Kate stares at herself in the mirror, pursing her lips and raising her brows in a come-hither pose. Her hand comes up to her cropped hair--after the chemo, it never grew back in waves, just thick straight tufts that she usually cultivates with mousse to look like bedhead. She holds her palm out, as if she still expects to see hair shedding.
"What do you think he sees when he looks at me?" Kate asks.
I come to stand behind her. She is not the child that mirrors me--that would be Jesse--and yet when you put us side by side, there are definite similarities. It's not in the shape of the mouth but the set of it, the sheer determination that silvers our eyes.
"I think he sees a girl who knows what he's been through," I tell her honestly.
"I got on the internet and read up on AML," she says. "His leukemia's got a pretty high cure rate." She turns to me. "When you care more if someone else lives than you do about yourself . . . is that what love's like?"
It is hard, all of a sudden, to pull an answer through the tunnel of my throat. "Exactly."
Kate runs the tap and washes her face with a foam of soap. I hand her a towel, and as she rises from the cloud of it, she says, "Something bad's going to happen."
On alert, I search her out for clues. "What's the matter?"
"Nothing. But that's the way it works. If there's something as good as Taylor in my life, I'm going to pay for it."
"That's the stupidest thing I've ever heard," I say out of habit, yet there is a truth to this. Anyone who believes that people have ultimate control of what life hands to them needs only to spend a day in the shoes of a child with leukemia. Or her mother. "Maybe you're finally getting a break," I say.
Three days later, during a routine CBC, the hematologist tells us that Kate is once again throwing promyelocytes, the first slide down a steep slope of relapse.
*
I have never eavesdropped, at least not intentionally, until the night that Kate comes back from her first date with Taylor, to see a movie. She tiptoes into her room and sits down on Anna's bed. "You awake?" she asks.
Anna rolls over, groans. "I am now." Sleep slips away from her, like a shawl falling to the floor. "How was it?"
"Wow," Kate says, and she laughs. "Wow."
"How wow? Like, tonsil hockey wow?"
"You are so disgusting," Kate whispers, although there's a smile behind it. "But he is a really good kisser." She dangles this like a fisherman.
"Get out!" Anna's voice shines. "So what was it like?"
"Flying," Kate answers. "I bet it feels just the same way."
"I don't get what that has in common with someone slobbering all over you."
"God, Anna, it's not like he spits on you."
"What does Taylor taste like?"
"Popcorn." She laughs. "And guy."
"How did you know what to do?"
"I didn't. It just kind of happened. Like the way you play hockey."
This, finally, makes sense to Anna. "Well," she says, "I do feel pretty good when I'm doing that."
"You have no idea," Kate sighs. There is some movement; I imagine her stripping off her clothes. I wonder if Taylor is imagining the same, somewhere.
Pillow is punched, cover yanked back, sheets rustle as Kate gets into bed and rolls onto her side. "Anna?"
"Hmm?"
"He has scars on his palms, from graft-versus-host," Kate murmurs. "I could feel them when we were holding hands."
"Was it gross?"
"No," she says. "It was like we matched."
*
At first, I can't get Kate to agree to undergo the peripheral blood stem cell transplant. She refuses because she doesn't want to be hospitalized for chemo, doesn't want to have to sit in reverse isolation for the next six weeks when she could be going out with Taylor Ambrose. "It's your life," I point out to her, and she looks at me as if I'm crazy.
"Exactly," she says.
In the end, we compromise. The oncology team agrees to let Kate begin her chemo as an outpatient, in preparation for a transplant from Anna. At home, she agrees to wear a mask. At the first indication of her counts dropping, she'll be hospitalized. They aren't happy; they worry it will affect the procedure, but like me they also understand that Kate has reached the age where she can bargain with her will.
As it turns out, this separation anxiety is all for naught, since Taylor shows up for Kate's first outpatient chemo appointment. "What are you doing here?"
"I can't seem to stay away," he jokes. "Hey, Mrs. Fitzgerald." He sits down beside Kate in the empty adjoining chair. "God, it feels good to be in one of these without an IV hookup."
"Rub it in," Kate mutters.
Taylor puts his hand on her arm. "How far into it are you?"
"Just started."
He gets up and sits on the wide arm of Kate's chair, picks the emesis basin up from Kate's lap. "A hundred bucks says you can't make it till three without tossing your cookies."
Kate glances at the clock. It is 2:50. "You're on."
"What did you have for lunch?" He grins, wicked. "Or should I guess based on the colors?"
"You're disgusting," Kate says, but her smile is as wide as the sea. Taylor puts his hand on her shoulder. She leans into the contact.
The first time Brian touched me, he saved my life. There had been cataclysmic downpours in Providence, a nor'easter that swelled the tides and put the parking lot at the courthouse entirely underwater. I was clerking then, when we were evacuated. Brian's department was in charge; I walked onto the stone steps of the building to see cars floating by, and abandoned purses, and even a terrified paddling dog. While I had been filing briefs, the world I knew had been submerged. "Need a hand?" Brian asked, dressed in his full turnout gear, and he held out his arms. As he swam me to higher ground, rain struck my face and pelted my back. I wondered how--in a deluge--I could feel like I was being burned alive.
"What's the longest you've ever gone before throwing up?" Kate asks Taylor.
"Two days."
<
br /> "Get out."
The nurse glances up from her paperwork. "True," she confirms. "I saw it with my own eyes."
Taylor grins at her. "I told you, I'm a master at this." He looks at the clock: 2:57.
"Don't you have anywhere else you'd rather be?" Kate says.
"Trying to weasel out of the bet?"
"Trying to spare you. Although--" Before she can finish, she goes green. Both the nurse and I rise from ours seats, but Taylor reaches Kate first. He holds the vomit basin beneath her chin and when she starts retching, he rubs his hand in slow circles on her upper back.
"It's okay," he soothes, close to her temple.
The nurse and I exchange glances. "Looks like she's in good hands," the nurse says, and she leaves to take care of another patient.
When Kate is finished, Taylor puts the basin aside and wipes her mouth with a tissue. She looks up at him, glow-eyed and flushed, her nose still running. "Sorry," she mutters.
"For what?" Taylor says. "Tomorrow, it could be me."
I wonder if all mothers feel like this the moment they realize their daughters are growing up--as if it is impossible to believe that the laundry I once folded for her was doll-sized; as if I can still see her dancing in lazy pirouettes along the lip of the sandbox. Wasn't it yesterday that her hand was only as big as the sand dollar she found on the beach? That same hand, the one that's holding a boy's; wasn't it just holding mine, tugging so that I might stop and see the spiderweb, the milkweed pod, any of a thousand moments she wanted me to freeze? Time is an optical illusion--never quite as solid or strong as we think it is. You would assume that, given everything, I saw this coming. But watching Kate watch this boy, I see I have a thousand things to learn.
"I'm some fun date," Kate murmurs.
Taylor smiles at her. "Fries," he says. "For lunch."
Kate smacks his shoulder. "You are disgusting."
He raises one brow. "You lost the bet, you know."
"I seem to have left my trust fund at home."
Taylor pretends to study her. "OK, I know what you can give me instead."
"Sexual favors?" Kate says, forgetting I am here.
"Gee, I don't know," Taylor laughs. "Should we ask your mom?"
She goes plum-red. "Oops."
"Keep this up," I warn, "and your next date will be during a bone marrow aspiration."
"You know the hospital has this dance, right?" Suddenly, Taylor is jittery; his knee bobs up and down. "It's for kids who are sick. There are doctors and nurses there, in case, and it's held in one of the conference rooms at the hospital, but for the most part it's just like a regular prom. You know, lame band, ugly tuxes, punch spiked with platelets." He swallows. "I'm just kidding about that last part. Well, I went last year, stag, and it was pretty dumb, but I figure since you're a patient and I'm a patient maybe this year we could, like, go together."
Kate, with an aplomb I never would have guessed she possesses, considers the offer. "When is it?"
"Saturday."
"As it turns out, I don't have plans to kick the bucket that day." She beams at him. "I'd love to."
"Cool," Taylor says, smiling. "Very cool." He reaches for a fresh basin, careful of Kate's IV line, which snakes down between them. I wonder if her heart is pumping faster, if it will affect the medication. If she'll be sicker, sooner rather than later.
Taylor settles Kate into the crook of his arm. Together, they wait for what comes next.
*
"It's too low," I say, as Kate holds a pale yellow dress up below her neck. From the spot on the boutique floor where she is sitting, Anna offers up her opinion, too: "You'd look like a banana."
We have been shopping for a prom dress for hours. Kate has only two days to prepare for this dance, and it has become an obsession: what she will wear, how she will do her makeup, if the band is going to play anything remotely decent. Her hair, of course, is not an issue; after chemo she lost it all. She hates wigs--they feel like bugs on her scalp, she says--but she's too self-conscious to go commando. Today, she has wrapped a batik scarf around her head, like a proud, pale African queen.
The reality of this outing hasn't matched Kate's dreams. Dresses that normal girls wear to proms bare the midriff or shoulders, where Kate's skin is riddled and thickened with scarring. They cling in all the wrong places. They are cut to showcase a healthy, hale body, not to hide the lack of it.
The saleswoman who hovers like a hummingbird takes the dress from Kate. "It's actually quite modest," she pushes. "It really does cover up a fair amount of cleavage."
"Will it cover this?" Kate snaps, popping open the buttons of her peasant blouse to reveal her recently replaced Hickman catheter, which sprouts from the center of her chest.
The saleswoman gasps before she can remember to stop herself. "Oh," she says faintly.
"Kate!" I scold.
She shakes her head. "Let's just get out of here."
As soon as we are on the street in front of the boutique I lace into her. "Just because you're angry, you don't have to take it out on the rest of the world."
"Well, she's a bitch," Kate retorts. "Did you see her looking at my scarf?"
"Maybe she just liked the pattern," I say dryly.
"Yeah, and maybe I'm going to wake up tomorrow and not be sick." Her words fall like boulders between us, cracking the sidewalk. "I'm not going to find a stupid dress. I don't know why I even told Taylor I'd go in the first place."
"Don't you think every other girl who's going to that dance is in the same boat? Trying to find gowns that cover up tubes and bruises and wires and colostomy bags and God knows what?"
"I don't care about anyone else," Kate says. "I wanted to look good. Really good, you know, for one night."
"Taylor already thinks you're beautiful."
"Well I don't!" Kate cries. "I don't, Mom, and maybe I want to just once."
It is a warm day, one where the ground beneath our feet seems to be breathing. The sun beats down on my head, on the back of my neck. What do I say to that? I have never been Kate. I have prayed and begged and wanted to be the one who's sick in lieu of her, some devil's Faustian bargain, but that is not the way it's happened.
"We'll sew something," I suggest. "You can design it."
"You don't know how to sew," Kate sighs.
"I'll learn."
"In a day?" She shakes her head. "You can't fix it every time, Mom. How come I know that, and you don't?"
She leaves me on the sidewalk and storms off. Anna runs after her, loops her arm through Kate's elbow, and drags her into a storefront a few feet away from the boutique, while I hurry to catch up.
It is a salon, filled with gum-cracking hairstylists. Kate is struggling to get away from Anna, but Anna, she can be strong when she wants to be. "Hey," Anna says, getting the attention of the receptionist. "Do you work here?"
"When I'm forced to."
"You guys do prom hairstyles?"
"Sure," the stylist says. "Like an updo?"
"Yeah. For my sister." Anna looks at Kate, who has stopped fighting. A smile glows slowly across her face, like a firefly caught in a jelly jar.
"That's right. For me," Kate says mischievously, and she unwinds the scarf from her bald head.
Everyone in the salon stops speaking. Kate stands regally straight. "We were thinking of French braids," Anna continues.
"A perm," Kate adds.
Anna giggles. "Maybe a nice chignon."
The stylist swallows, caught between shock and sympathy and political correctness. "Well, um, we might be able to do something for you." She clears her throat. "There's always, you know, extensions."
"Extensions," Anna repeats, and Kate bursts out laughing.
The stylist begins to look behind the girls, toward the ceiling. "Is this like a Candid Camera thing?"
At that, my daughters collapse into each other's arms, hysterical. They laugh until they cannot catch their breath. They laugh until they cry.
*
&nb
sp; As a chaperone at the Providence Hospital Prom, I am in charge of the punch. Like every other food item provided for the celebrants, it's neutropenic. The nurses--fairy godmothers for the night--have converted a conference room into a fantasy dance hall, complete with streamers and a disco ball and mood lighting.
Kate is a vine twined around Taylor. They sway to completely different music than the song that is playing. Kate wears her obligatory blue mask. Taylor has given her a corsage made of silk flowers, because real ones can carry diseases that immunocompromised patients can't fight off. In the end, I did not wind up sewing a dress; I found one online at Bluefly.com: a gold sheath, cut in a V for Kate's catheter. But over this is a long-sleeved, sheer shirt, one that wraps at the waist and glimmers when she turns this way and that so when you notice the strange triple tubing coming out by her breastbone, you wonder if it was only a trick of the light.
We took a thousand photos before leaving the house. When Kate and Taylor had escaped and were waiting for me in the car, I went to put the camera away and found Brian in the kitchen with his back to me. "Hey," I said. "You going to wave us off? Throw rice?"
It was only when he turned around that I realized he'd come in here to cry. "I didn't expect to see this," he said. "I didn't think I'd get to have this memory."
I fitted myself against him, working our bodies so tight it felt as if we'd been carved from the same smooth stone. "Wait up for us," I whispered, and then I left.
Now, I hand a cup of punch to a boy whose hair is just starting to fall out in small tufts. It sheds on the black lapel of his tuxedo. "Thanks," he says, and I see he has the most beautiful eyes, dark and still as a panther's. I glance away and realize that Kate and Taylor are gone.
What if she's sick? What if he's sick? I have promised myself I wouldn't be overprotective, but there are too many children here for the staff to really keep track of. I ask another parent to take over my punch station and then I search out the ladies' room. I check the supply closet. I walk through empty hallways and dark corridors and even the chapel.
Finally I hear Kate's voice through a cracked doorway. She and Taylor stand under a spotlight moon, holding hands. The courtyard they've found is a favorite for the residents during the daytime; many doctors who wouldn't otherwise see the light of the sun take their lunches out here.